Hush Hush

by Steven Barthelme

  • • •

  Son of a bitch used to come by once a week, or once a month, and pretend to be my father. Teach me things. He was a Boy Scout all right.

  The guy in the cowboy shirt started to rise, brought a hand around and caught Mitchell’s ear so hard he thought he was going to black out, and he slammed the guy’s head back down against the blacktop. “Fucker,” he said. “You miserable drunken slut.” He held the cowboy’s head down against the pavement, but the man was still.

  If I kill him, Mitchell thought, they’ll put me in Huntsville, I’m not rich enough to get out of it. He felt weak, and tired. His ear hurt. I shouldn’t drink, he thought, not so much. We took the snake back and put it in that aquarium. It died, later. Never took me to let it go. He was afraid of me.

  • • •

  Joanne was waiting in the front yard, pretending to be watering, but Quinn knew that she was there because they were late, so he was surprised she didn’t complain, about the time or even about the child’s new pet. Instead she asked him in.

  “Stewart?” Quinn said.

  “He’s not here,” she said, shutting off the hose. She was wearing sandals, and a light cotton dress, busy, blue marked with black.

  She had moved in with somebody, but not until five years after the divorce, and by that time they had developed an easy friendship, so that she would say, We had a miserable marriage, but a happy divorce. Stewart did something with computers and telephone systems. In the wide, light living room, Quinn settled opposite her, on the arm of a big off-white armchair. She was sitting on a couch.

  “You’re sure it’s not dangerous?” she said, when Mitch had disappeared into the back of the house with the snake.

  Quinn shook his head. “If it bites him, put some peroxide on it. Just like any other scratch.”

  “Well, maybe he’ll learn some responsibility,” she said.

  Quinn looked at the carpet. “Jesus, I wouldn’t want to be a kid again. Always getting taught stuff.”

  She looked at him.

  “I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.

  Her silence was worse, he thought, than any of the things he was imagining her saying, things about responsibility, about his being still more kid than man, about what he should be doing for his child that Stewart was now doing and how good Stewart was at it.

  “I just meant that sometimes I wonder whether what I’m teaching him is right.”

  “You have the leisure,” she said. Then she looked down. “I’m sorry. I wanted to talk to you, I really did. And now we’ve gotten into this. It was a rotten thing to say. I’m sorry.” She shrugged, and showed him her open hands.

  “None taken,” he said, and took her hand, releasing it quickly. “It’s just talk. Relax.”

  “Tell me something, Quinn,” she said, and looked away. “When you were … when you used to sleep with Marianne and come home to me, how did you feel about me? I mean, did you—” She smiled. “I don’t know what I mean.”

  “You mean Stewart is …”

  She shook her head, slowly, and her look was tentative, wary. “Me,” she said, and looked up.

  “You want an answer?” He waited for her to nod, but she didn’t, just kept staring, so he looked away. “Well, it’s not very useful, but what I felt was—I loved you both.” He smiled. “I still love you. Don’t know where she is. So it goes, I guess.”

  “You’re right. It’s not very useful.” The boy said something, from the back, coming down the hall toward the living room. Outside it was beginning to get dark. She looked toward the hall. “Stewart is sweet,” she said.

  Quinn rolled his eyes at her.

  • • •

  Mitchell got up. Some kid came out of a door in the back of the dark bar, carrying a silver tub, poured it out, looked at them, walked back inside. The cowboy opened his eyes and got up on his elbows, then his knees, then stood.

  Mitchell looked at him, vague, uncertain, and then he stopped caring. The cowboy began swinging, hitting him, first softly, clumsily, and then, when Mitchell just stood with his arms hanging, harder and harder until Mitchell’s cheek was cut below his eye and his nose was gushing blood and he wobbled and then fell. The cowboy spit. No wonder they like it so much, Mitchell thought. It’s easy. He was afraid I wouldn’t like him. Didn’t know what he was doing. He didn’t have a clue. And then he died. Mitchell smiled, and closed his eyes. That must’ve come as a shock.

  Heaven

  The poet delicately picks his nose while talking on my telephone, his old abraded sneakers up on my coffee table. This is authentic behavior, the poet is proving that he is a poet, at least I assume that’s what he’s doing. He glances up at me and then continues his picking and his conversation. “In this country!” he shouts into the receiver. It’s a joke; he is talking to a poet about a poet. Much laughter. He puts something in the ashtray.

  Is he a good poet? He is thought by poetry authorities to be a good poet, but what do they know? I love him, but this does not blind me to his poetry. In the poem he wrote about me after my death, I wrote the only good line. He was quoting me, but the attribution was somewhat vague. I was dead twenty-one minutes before he got to the typewriter.

  My sister, inexplicably, doesn’t want to sleep with the poet, though I have offered him to her on several occasions. My sister said she’d design her own therapy, thank you. He looks like he needs a bath, she said, he looks a touch gamey, gamey is the word. Poets prize that look, I said. He sleeps with women by the dozens, I said. Golly, she said. Poets get them down any way they can—liquor, B-pluses, enigmas. This isn’t winning, she said. Making up for high school, I said.

  Heaven. In heaven, no hardwood floors and no baseball and poets caught talking about sports get the rack. Yesterday I saw Jesus in a leather hat.

  Here is what the poet is saying on the telephone: “Back together? Really? In Vermont she and Bruno and Tige got naked in the lake and alors, voila …” Another part of it is like this: “… and so her pants were on inside out, har har har …” It’s a long distance call.

  Here is what the poet says in the classroom: “Be inexplicable, but not inexplicatable. Be emendatious but not cementatious (Not in my dictionary; suspect that’s a coinage). Be abominable yet abdominal. Make it newt. (I hear poorly, so this could have been ‘Make it new,’ although he loathes Pound; it may have been ‘Make a note’—sometimes he feigns a boffo French accent.) Oh, and see me after class, Caitlin, Feta, An Li, Eschscholzia, Daisy, Zinnia, Dahlia.”

  Before being admitted into heaven I suffered ninety days in purgatory, which is how I know he wrote a poem about me after I died. It was okay. Some people get the exercise bike. Apparently there’s no hell.

  The poet drives a Land Rover, of course. Loves his wife. Rubs dogs with great gusto.

  In heaven Scotch is blessedly harmless, and my back has finally stopped hurting, and my body’s really buffed. Didn’t require crunches, either, which are what I got into poetry to avoid. But the poet has written, “All a poet really needs is a six-pack and a six-pack. Grolsch—and really ripped abs,” he explained. “But Grolsch is expensive!” I cried. “In this country,” he said.

  Heaven resembles a very large Days Inn where God is always wandering around saying, “Have you seen Jesus? Have you seen Jesus?” They argue constantly. Jesus says, “ ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise?’ ” alluding to something his Father said (1st Corinthians, I looked it up) and snaps his fingers. “Fundamentally unserious, Dad.”

  “I guess I should frown more,” his Father says, and gives a weary look. The building, heaven, goes on as far as the eye can see, into the clouds. In the lobby in the morning an enormously long white tablecloth appears, with coffee and one lemon Danish, which renews itself endlessly. Angels are everywhere, dancing.

  The poet’s life has been lived on the edge, in several countries, in his friends’ apartments. The poet spent twelve years working for the John Deere Corporation, two weeks in law school in Boston, a
night and day in jail on a vagrancy charge (inspiration for the poems, later, in I Fought the Law), and once played tambo in a rock band. The band got him started in poetry when he discovered deep feeling and first wore a perm. “Candy from a bebe,” he says of that period.

  “Only women understand me,” he says. With the help of a wealthy coal widow he started The New Bituminous Review and filled it with uncanny and haunting work by the editors of other magazines. Then for three years he fearlessly walked up and down Sixth Avenue, filling out grant applications, winning nine. “It’s a poet eat poet world out there,” he says.

  They don’t only argue. Last week, God and Jesus were in the main lobby, rolling on the carpet, laughing about Hell. “Who could have known that they’d take that seriously?” God said. “They’ve been worrying about that for two thousand years!” he snorted, and fell into convulsions of laughter. “And—and—” Jesus said, wiping tears from his shining eyes, “and we were only kidding! God, they must think we’re mean!” And they walked off slapping their foreheads and kneecaps and Jesus’ hat fell off. His eyes are intensely beautiful, blue. Very tall.

  The poet is thought to have a very good gamey look, I told my sister. One of the top five, among contemporary American poets. His wife won’t mind, I said, because he’s an artist. What is his poetry about? she said. Anguish, I said. Black woe. Raw unashamed passion. Black Lung. A number of his newest poems shockingly unmask the pylorus, where a valve inextricably links man’s stomach to his small intestine.

  My death came about in this way: I poisoned myself, with loathing. And envy, there was some envy. Mostly loathing.

  The poet is off the phone. He has a legal pad and a blue and black German pencil, working probably on “Reflux.” It’s a new one in the Los Angeles Lakers series. “Overweight and eager …” the poem begins. He pauses, pencil to his lips. He is thinking. I ask if he will stay to dinner, and he slams the pencil down, enraged. “Oh, Christ,” he says, “can’t you see I’m working? What’re you having? I’ll invite Peesha, Pasha, and Tony. It’s all ruined now,” he says. The pencil is very beautiful. He picks up the telephone.

  Jesus comes over to me when I’m out on a chaise beside one of the pools; he’s holding a fat red book in one hand and in the other, two lemonade cans from the vending machine. He hands me one. Frigid. All around us, people are getting to their feet. Music is playing somewhere.

  “A hat?” I say. “You’re never in a hat in the pictures.”

  “I’m two thousand years old,” Jesus says, and pats the leather hat. “I’ll wear a hat if I feel like it.” He gives a droll smile. “I have you down here for loathing and envy,” he says, looking up from the red ledger. “You must forgive him.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” I say, and take a drink. It’s Handel, the music.

  “Bo, I’m Jesus. Why are you bothering to lie to me?”

  “Yes, sorry, I forgot. Gosh, this lemonade is cold.”

  Jesus sighs. “That’s a nice touch, that ‘Gosh.’ A little foolish, considering that you’re already in heaven. Still, ‘God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise.’ ” He shrugs. “It’s in 1st Corinthians.”

  “That’d be Chapter 1,” I say, “verse 27?”

  He glances sharply at me for a second but recovers, nods, and slaps the red book on his pants. “You must forgive him.”

  “Okay. I forgive him.”

  Jesus looks at me with his brilliant eyes. It’s the sort of long, theatrically patient look one gets not from a father but from a beloved older brother.

  “Okay, I don’t forgive him. Okay.” The breeze in heaven is soft, sweet, smells delicately of oranges.

  The poet wants to write good poetry, I know he does. He does not think of himself as a dull, careerist predator and sham. He could be a counterfeit and write great poetry at the same time, perhaps. He wants to know awe. He wants to have important things to say to his fellows, to make cold souls warm, to ease hurt, to praise love, to give hope to the despairing and companion to the lonely, to hold the breath of wisdom in his hand for an instant, to add to what we have. He wants to see. Even a blind squirrel finds a … No, nevermind that.

  “Jesus, this is hard. This is hard,” I say, “Jesus.”

  His eyes are terrible.

  Interview

  Three weeks after Terry Quinn quit his fancy job at the law firm, got in his car, left Atlanta and drove a thousand miles back to Texas, he went to a party. He had been living at a motel since he’d arrived in Austin, and for three weeks had spoken to no one but gas station clerks, waitresses, and supermarket checkers. The law office was looking better and better, in hindsight. Maybe, he thought, running away from home at thirty-two wasn’t such a great idea.

  He’d been told about the party by a woman named Liz, an attractive half-Japanese woman who he had met once ten years earlier. It happened that she worked at the branch library where he had spent a long afternoon reading some hopeless career-change book with an embarrassingly silly name. The ten minutes talking to her was so pleasant to him that even though he usually hated and feared parties, he had decided to go. He had considered offering to take her, but decided against it, unsure of what her casual “You should come” might have meant. So he went back to the motel and thought about her and waited for nine o’clock.

  The party was in a big stone house beside a lake, and music and people spilled out onto the courtyard and a paved area adjacent to it. Liz was only there for half an hour or so, but she was even more enchanting in the evening than she had been in the afternoon. They stood together outside in the night air, talking about law school, which she had quit, and cats, or kittens, which she was giving away. As she spoke, she absently buttoned and unbuttoned the cuff of her sleeve. After talking for a while Quinn managed to make a date to take her to dinner the following Tuesday, which as it turned out was her birthday. When she had gone he lingered, watching people drink and dance, remembering why he didn’t like parties, sometimes entering into brief conversations with friendly drunks.

  One was a man named Allen Powell, a chunky, hard-faced guy who drew from people an urgent and automatic deference and who seemed to own a number of businesses—an apartment complex, at least two restaurants, a delivery service, and others, some less savory, apparently. Powell had a dull, distracted, almost pensive expression as he stood outside with Quinn, staring out at the dark lake, watching lights ripple on the water.

  “So, what do you do?” he asked, and when Quinn said that he was out of work, Powell offered him a job in a car repair shop—completely indifferent to his meager experience—and instructed him to talk to a man named Rollo, or failing that, a drunk named Lancaster. Quinn laughed, thanked him, and left. As he was walking off, he thought he heard someone say, “Well, fuck you,” and as he turned back to look, his shoe slipped on a stone step and he twisted his knee. Powell had disappeared.

  Quinn had just rented a small apartment, but hadn’t yet quit the motel, and the twenty-one hundred dollars cash money he had brought with him from Atlanta was almost gone. The initial exhilaration of ditching his whole life had shortly worn thin, and his few attempts to find work had been as fruitless as they had been desultory, consisting mostly of studying the want ads and remembering that he didn’t know how to do anything but tax law, and that even if he wasn’t good at it, no one had ever seemed to notice. It bewildered him. He was a fraud, but no one cared.

  He had resolved not to do law anymore because this feeling of fraudulence about work, which everyone seemed to feel but most people forgot or shrugged off, bothered him unduly. The fraud had extended past work, though, to his purchase on everything in his life, including the wife from whom he was separated, and whose diagnosis was that he had unrealistic expectations. She had once suggested what she called “What Did You Expect Therapy.”

  Three weeks in Austin, where he had gone to school, had reminded Quinn how much he had depended on his job, fraud or no. The city had not changed much, but
it wasn’t his anymore.

  During the day, driving his old car, he felt the shiny new Acuras and Saabs and minivans pushing him off their clean streets and freeways. He would signal and then switch lanes, thinking, They belong here. Sometimes at night he stood at the front window of the motel room, holding the curtain aside, watching headlights of the cars on the streets, envying the drivers their jobs, houses, children, garden hoses, and the newspaper which appeared on their driveways each morning.

  So even though Powell was clearly some kind of drug baron or celebrity felon, a few days after the party Quinn decided to become a mechanic. He had fixed some cars, once. Even got paid a couple of times. Anyway, he was running out of money.

  But he felt things were looking up. The utilities were on now in his tiny new apartment and he had got the telephone turned on. And the woman from the library held out the hope that women always did, that everything might be different.

  It was Tuesday, not much past noon, when he limped up to the motel office to settle the bill, thinking, Move out, move in, get a job, go to dinner, fall in love, Wednesday.

  The day clerk, a Spanish man, balding, very tall, was sitting on a stool, watching a Mexican television show and reading a newspaper. He rose as Quinn walked into the lobby, and standing, he looked like NBA material.

  “Through tomorrow noon,” Quinn said. “What does it come to?”

  The clerk pulled out the bill, unfolded it on the counter, bent over and wrote furiously with a gold pen. He twirled the bill around.

  Quinn looked at the six hundred dollars left in his wallet, took out a credit card. He assumed that by now his wife had already cancelled all the cards—I would, he thought—but it was worth a shot. “Try this.”

  The man nodded. “You got a weekly rate,” he said, and laughed.

  Quinn looked at him.

  He smiled. “We don’t use it very often. But we got it so you got it.” He flashed the credit card through the slot, and then ran off the slip and handed the card back. After a moment, he shook his head in a showy sort of way, and said, “I am sorry, but could I try this card again? The machine, it’s—”